Norm Smith launches new career as optometrist as he nears 70

Ross William Hamilton/The Oregonian Norm Smith (right) and classmates attend a morning seminar Thursday at Pacific University College of Optometry. After a long life of business ventures, Smith turns 70 in July, but is in no mood to retire. He will launch a new career in optometry after he graduates Saturday as a doctor of optometry.

Before you conclude you're too old to learn the piano, write a book or launch a new career, meet Norm Smith.

The Portland-area native and lifelong entrepreneur will graduate Saturday from Pacific University in Forest Grove as a doctor of optometry -- at age 69.

"I honestly don't know why more people don't do this," says Smith. "It is a great career for midlife or later. ... I think a lot of people could do something like this if they really wanted to."

After he sold a company that made plastic disposable medical containers, Smith, of Oak Harbor on Washington's Whidbey Island, looked for a new challenge.

He'd always worked for himself and was proud he never wrote a resume. In high school while growing up in Vancouver, Wash., he assembled control panels for a fire alarm company. He gillnetted salmon on the Columbia River, owned a shrimp fleet in Key West, Fla., and fished tuna in his own boat off the Oregon coast. He owned an A&W Drive-In in Lake Oswego, led a construction company, imported machine tools and operated a seafood business.

At this stage in life, he didn't want to invest a lot of money, so he looked for a small business. But to make money, he needed to find a business with a high "bar to entry," he says.

That led him to optometry.

"It is a decent paying profession, and they tend to be pretty happy
people," he says. "It is the only profession I know where you can build a
lifestyle around the profession."

Graduation ceremonies 2012

Many Oregon private colleges have had commencements, but the following undergraduate ceremonies remain:

He needed to take about a year's worth of prerequisite courses like organic chemistry before he could be considered for the four-year graduate program. He completed the prep work over two years at a community college near his Oak Harbor home.

Then he applied to all 17 optometry colleges operating nationwide at the time. He had good grades, good test scores, but he was 65. Most schools did not respond.

Only Pacific offered him a shot.

Top student

Smith quickly fit in with his 90 classmates at Pacific's College of Optometry. Most were in their 20s and 30s, but Smith held his own in classes like neuroanatomy, optics, ocular disease and pharmacology, says student David Glabe, 28.

"Norm is more studious than anybody I know," he says. "We would study with him. His notes were more organized, and he had been over the material more times and knew it better than most of the rest of us. ... He could easily have used the age trump card, and he never really did."

It is harder to learn and remember at his age, says Smith, "but that doesn't mean you can't do it."

Smith spent a lot of time studying and sharing notes with classmate Kyle Gwinner, another latecomer. Gwinner, 45, had been out of school more than two decades working as a financial consultant.

"Both of us studied a lot, and that is probably what brought us together," Gwinner says. "You are only as old as you feel. He is very sharp, and he loves a challenge."

Smith's life experience sometimes gave him an edge, such as in a business management course that required students to produce a business plan. Most of their plans included heavy borrowing for new equipment, such as a refractor to measure lens prescriptions, Glabe said.

But Smith knew investors would not support so much debt. He discovered about 1,200 optometrists were retiring around the country, and ophthalmologists had been consolidating. He found top equipment being auctioned for as little as 10 cents on the dollar. He showed how he could set up a clinic with $200,000 worth of optometry equipment for $25,000 to $30,000.

And that's what he did. Smith is already equipped to go into business.

He also could have paid his $45,000 annual tuition up front, but he says it made more financial sense to take government loans, which give him 25 years to pay back.

Smith is Pacific's, and probably the nation's, oldest optometry student ever, says James Kundart, an optometrist and professor at Pacific.

"This is a challenge he wanted to take on, and I'll be darned if he didn't do it," Kundart says. "He has the combination of intellectual curiosity and the business mind I like to see in professional students."

Kundart, 42, taught Smith for three classes and a clinic.

"I hope to practice as an educator up to his age," says the professor. "He has changed my perspective on what is important." A new career

Smith spent the last school year in clinical rotations that included a stint at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tacoma. He says he has been drawn to his older patients.

"A lot of them are my peers, and they are very comfortable with me," he says. "They don't have to put on a face for anybody."

So Smith may set up shop serving older people in nursing or hospice homes where eye care is limited. "I intend to work two or three days a week," he says. "I intend to work seriously at it, but I have other things we are doing, too."

He plans to build kitchen cabinets for Alice, his wife of 49 years, and reserve time for their four children and seven grandchildren.

Smith has reason to believe he has at least 15 to 20 years to practice. His family has no history of heart disease, cancer, diabetes or other chronic conditions. His grandfather, who came to the Northwest in a covered wagon, was active until he was 102. And his father worked in the family's Portland-based lumber business into his late 90s. Both men worked up until a few days of their deaths.